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Tilting at Lampposts

Susan Harder in her East Village apartment: It seems like everything we do is fear-based.Credit
Richard Perry/The New York Times

Susan Harder, a former photo gallery owner who has lived for decades in the same walk-up apartment on East 10th Street, is the first to acknowledge that she is all of 57 years old, but she emanates an air of schoolgirlish mischief. Her blue eyes twinkle, her blond ponytail bounces, and she punctuates her sentences with what can only be described as giggles.

Nevertheless, unlike many schoolgirls, Ms. Harder is a woman with a mission.

The mission, which has absorbed her energies 40 hours a week for the past decade, is the fight against what is known by the somewhat anodyne term “light pollution” or, as Ms. Harder puts it with typical vigor, “our insane, just insane love of lighting absolutely everything up.”

From streetlights to billboards to parking lots to private properties, she contends, in cities, suburbs and rural areas, the country is awash in excess light. This light, she claims, squanders money and energy, upsets the ecological balance, causes accidents, makes people sick and diminishes the beauty of the environment, both natural and man-made. The problem may be especially noticeable during the dark days of winter — Thursday is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year — but in the eyes of crusaders like Ms. Harder, it exists year round.

“One day,” she said on a recent evening, over dinner in a small restaurant on Second Avenue across the street from her apartment, “we’ll look back at light pollution in the same way we do the recycling or ecology movements, and wonder how we ever could have thought otherwise. “I really do believe that,” she continued, tapping the table of the restaurant decisively.

Ms. Harder’s evolution as a crusader against light pollution began 20 years ago. It was then that St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, which sits on 10th Street near Second Avenue directly across from her apartment, installed a series of “wall pack” fixtures around its exterior. Wall packs are those ubiquitous orange floodlights from which emanate as much as 1,000 watts of power; three of them shined directly up into Ms. Harder’s apartment.

She eventually complained. Church officials responded by saying that they were merely trying to prevent assaults and robberies in the St. Mark’s graveyard. Ms. Harder countered that no assaults or robberies were taking place in her bedroom, so why light it up?

Church officials finally agreed to tape over the top of the lights, and Ms. Harder went so far as to paint over her windowpanes and install triple-layer blackout curtains, but to little effect. “I mean, I was being tortured by it,” she said. (Jimmy Fragosa, church sexton, confirmed that St. Mark’s had modified the lights in response to her objections, adding, “We haven’t had any more complaints.”)

The following year, a second “light trespass” incident, as such events are technically known, took place outside the house in East Hampton that Ms. Harder owns with her partner, John Imperatore. A full-time fighter in the battle against light pollution was born.

“That’s when I became a full-time dark-sky advocate,” Ms. Harder said. “That’s when I knew there was no escape wherever you were.”

Since then, she has come a long way. She has plunged into the byzantine ways of Albany, where three times, unsuccessfully so far, she has lobbied for and contributed information to legislation that would control exterior lighting levels. (Ever hopeful, she plans to try again next year.)

She has delved into the arcane world of lumens, foot-candles and uniformity ratios. She has analyzed the pros and cons of high-pressure sodium bulbs versus metal halide ones, and become intimate with the properties of the semi cut-off luminaire — a luminaire is engineer-speak for a light — versus the full cut-off luminaire.

She eagerly spouts statistics on subjects like a possible link between prolonged exposure to artificial light at night and breast cancer (the correlation exists, she says, citing a 2005 article in the journal Cancer Research) or the connection between additional street lighting and decreases in crime (that connection doesn’t exist, she says). Elected officials in the city and beyond have grown accustomed to her combination of sweet talk, cajoling and bullying.

In short, Ms. Harder has become a virtual one-woman dark-sky mover and shaker in a city and state that she describes as “way, way behind the curve” in their lighting policies. “The whole Czech Republic has a lighting law,” she pointed out. “Lombardy has a lighting law. Malta has a lighting law. Long Island’s done wonderful things. But there’s something about New York.”

With a jaundiced eye, she gazed at the small park across the street from the restaurant. “I mean, imagine what they’d make of that in Paris,” Ms. Harder said. “But here some lighting designer just dropped down a few standard unshielded high-pressure sodium lights, and the result is a mess. A total mess.”

Despite major victories on Long Island — the towns of Riverhead, Huntington, East Hampton and most recently Brookhaven have all implemented dark-sky legislation in the past three years, largely based on her suggestions — Ms. Harder has found New York a tougher nut to crack. This, she and others contend, is because the city’s Department of Transportation, which oversees the installation of New York’s streetlights, has regularly opposed dark-sky legislation introduced in Albany, citing safety issues.

“The real buzz saw we come up against repeatedly is the city,” said Assemblyman Alexander Grannis, a Democrat who represents the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island and who three times in the past four years has sponsored dark-sky legislation in Albany with State Senator Carl Marcellino, a Republican from Long Island. “They have a certain type of approach that theirs is the only way to deal with the issue and ‘we’re not going to change.’ ”

In response, Iris Weinshall, the transportation commissioner, said in a statement that the city was taking measures to reduce the wattage of its 180,000 streetlights. But Ms. Weinshall added: “Our streetlights are critical to keeping pedestrians, motorists and cyclists safe at night, and we’ll continue to do our best to make sure that our streets are safe and well-lit." A department spokeswoman, Kay Sarlin, said the agency receives hundreds of requests a year for new streetlights “from residents concerned that their streets are too dark.”

And Steven Galgano, executive director of engineering for the agency’s Traffic Operations Division, described as “unacceptable” any of the new designs for street lighting he had seen from dark-sky advocates. Those designs, he added, were less bright and focused light more directly downward. The fixtures currently used by the department, he said, are only partly shielded and create a uniform blanket of light with no dark patches between the bright spots.

On a major urban highway, like the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he added, if motorists had to rapidly adjust their eyes as they move from bright area to dark areas, it could be dangerous. “But if anyone can show us a full cut-off luminaire that needs less energy and produces the same amount of light,” Mr. Galgano said, “we’d be happy to look at it.”

Nor is the Transportation Department the dark-sky movement’s only adversary. Opposition also comes from some of the city’s business improvement districts, as was apparent one evening a few weeks ago when Ms. Harder conducted a little tour of what she regards as some of the city’s dark-sky trouble spots. At the wheel was her partner, Mr. Imperatore, a real estate developer and patient chauffeur.

The first stop was Midtown. “The whole area around Penn Station all the way to Grand Central is just insane,” Ms. Harder said. “They put up all these drop-pendant double jobbers using metal halide. It’s just sick.”

The “double jobbers” were twin-headed 250-watt fixtures that emitted an intense blue-white light, and had been installed by the 34th Street Partnership, a business improvement district. These lights, combined with the lighting on storefronts and billboards in the district, many of them outfitted with 10 or more thousand-watt bulbs, produced a glow that seemed uncannily similar to daylight. People and objects were clearly visible, yet strangely indistinct. Depth of field seemed to disappear.

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At Seventh Avenue and 36th Street, Ms. Harder pointed out three double-headed fixtures on one corner. “A cluster glare bomb!” she announced brightly.

Two blocks south, she noted a spot where 11 thousand-watt lights beneath a billboard did battle with a combined 500 watts of street lighting on the corner. Ms. Harder sighed. “I mean, which responsible human being would design lighting like this?” she said.

Farther downtown, she stopped to comment on what she saw as yet another troublesome area. Lining both sides of Broadway from Fulton Street to the Battery stood fixtures that resembled giant cigarettes placed on end.

“It’s Obi-Wan Kenobi’s swords!” Ms. Harder said with a giggle. “Seriously, lighting designers love this stuff. Their creed is ‘Glare is Good.’ And there’s no light hitting the ground, see? It all hits these beautiful old buildings and washes them out. You can’t see a thing.”

Gently, Mr. Imperatore intervened. “Honey,” he said, “I think it’s time to head elsewhere.” He turned south past City Hall, at which point Ms. Harder let out a squeal: “Ohh! O.K.! There’s a great example of good lighting.”

She pointed to a number of gaslights set in historical fixtures, flickering faintly yet clearly illuminating City Hall Park. “Those are sensitive,” she said. “They do their job. They don’t blind you, but you can see where you’re going.”

It’s hard to imagine how dark the city was until well into the 19th century. The first public lighting company, the New York Gas Company, was sanctioned by the city in 1823 to light the streets south of Grand Street. Gaslight was dangerous, flickering and dirty, and most New Yorkers, with good reason, feared the night as a time of disorder. By 1880, crude electric arc lights were set up between 42nd and 53rd Streets along Broadway, the first avenue in the country to be so illuminated, later giving rise to the label “The Great White Way.”

New inventions began arriving in a frenzy. In 1882, Thomas Edison opened the world’s first electric generating station, on Pearl Street. The following year brought a new gas mantle with an incandescent burner that emitted a white light three times as bright as the old gaslights; it, too, would be vanquished by the march of electric lighting.

Lest one imagines this light was all for “serious” purposes, New Yorkers showed their true concerns early on: By the 1890s, Madison Square was home to a giant electric billboard advertising a Coney Island hotel, 80 feet by 50, consisting of 15,000 individual lights controlled by an operator, and another, 47 feet long, promoting Heinz pickles. In the 1880s, Lady Liberty’s hand was so brightly illuminated by electric light that mariners complained and it was toned down. The city’s romance with electric light was instant and all-consuming.

With all this in mind, the question arises: Are Ms. Harder and her colleagues merely tilting at windmills? Some public-minded people seem genuinely surprised by her views, among them Daniel Biederman, president of the 34th Street Partnership.

In the 1990s, when up to four times as many murders and robberies were reported in the city as now, Mr. Biederman’s organization installed the “double-jobbers” that Ms. Harder found so offensive.

“Safety was our major goal when we began,” Mr. Biederman said. “The area was incredibly dark, and crime was very high. We deliberately chose metal halide because it doesn’t impart a sickly glow. The sodium vapor lights made people look as if they were ill.”

Crime statistics over the years have borne out his assumptions, he said, with an overall decrease in street crime in the area since 1991 “of about 85 to 90 percent.”

For Ms. Harder, such tactics are merely “overkill.”

“It seems like everything we do is fear-based,” she said. “Look, I don’t want to switch off all the lights — this is New York City — but I am against excessive and wasteful lighting. You could cut back those wattages by 50 percent and it wouldn’t make a difference.”

In response, Mr. Biederman said he was not aware “of a single letter” from anyone requesting less light, but added that he would be happy to discuss ways to address the situation while still keeping things safe. “I’d be absolutely receptive to it,” he said. “And I’d do it at some cost, too, if we felt it was right.”

Given New York’s early sweet tooth for electric advertisements, it’s not surprising that bright ads and billboards continue to be a major part of the city’s light pollution problem. Councilman Alan Gerson, whose district includes SoHo, NoHo and the Lower East Side, is drafting legislation to control certain flashing illuminated billboards, private security lights on roofs and other such “nuisance” lights.

“It’s a growing problem,” said Mr. Gerson, who hopes to introduce his legislation early next year and is optimistic about its chances. “Buildings are putting up intense lights on their facades and rooftops, for commercial or security reasons, and they forget it shines into people’s windows.”

Despite these and other obstacles, Ms. Harder remains an optimist.

“More and more advocacy groups are adopting lighting pollution as part of their collective agenda,” she said. “The fact that the Sierra Club has taken on the issue, the fact that the American Lung Association and the Natural Resources Defense Council both came out behind Grannis’s legislation — this is fantastic.”

Ben Gibberd’s book “New York Waters: Profiles From the Edge,” with photographs by Randy Duchaine, will be published in May by Globe Pequot Press.